


Five Years (or the importance of good timing)

by Cuits



Category: Crazy Stupid Love (2011)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-10-21
Updated: 2012-10-21
Packaged: 2017-11-16 18:38:01
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,497
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/542596
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cuits/pseuds/Cuits
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Robbie still misses Jessica, of course, but he has also come to terms with the fact that Jessica and he are in it – in love – for the long run, so he follows his father’s advice and learns to enjoy his age.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Five Years (or the importance of good timing)

**Author's Note:**

> My many and hearful thanks to Dasku. My beta and probably the only other person aside of me that's ever going to read this.

**At eighteen** , Jessica has moved to a shared room in a student dorm at Brown leaving behind her family, her friends, the neighborhood she has known all her life and all the great drama of the last year of high school. She is an independent woman now, not a child anymore. She is exactly where she is supposed to be, where she wants to be and if sometimes she just wants to go home, hide under the covers and never come out again, she tells herself that is just because the winter is hitting hard this year and the heating in her building is terrible.

She has a roommate – _Sophia, but you can call me Sophie_ – that likes to eat crunchy smelly things absolutely all the time leaving crumbs of unidentified snacks on every conceivable corner of their room, and whose boyfriend, Jessica suspects, is evolutionally nearer to an ape than a human.

She has succeeded on making most of her wardrobe pink thanks to a previously unwashed pair of red socks that had managed to sneak themselves into her mainly white bundle of clothes for laundry, and she is pretty sure that at least half of the male population in campus is shorter than her.

All things considered, Jess is not precisely having fun in the widely understood meaning of the term, but Brown is a great university and a big opportunity and a very demanding academic institution so she goes to the library every day running away from her full-of-crumbs, noisy room and claims a desk as her own by virtue of extended use. She focusses on her notes and her books instead of on how sad and homesick she really feels. She smiles a lot and talks scarcely and pretends that the mortifying, devastating events she has secretly christened as the Weaver Situation never ever took place.

At eighteen Jessica is absolutely not having the time of her life but she has this almost physical need to leave her life behind and after all, college is suppose to be about new beginnings, right?

__

At fourteen Robbie wakes up every day to this irrational persistent hope that he has, somehow, grown up exponentially during the night and every single morning he runs to the bathroom expecting, wishing, to see a younger version of his father looking back at him on the mirror and not this shaggy, sleepy teenager that he finds instead.

He misses Jessica. He misses her so much that he finds himself in detention every other week for carving her name on the most unsuspecting surfaces, most of the time without any premeditated intention.

He sighs a lot and mops a lot and is called a weirdo a lot but at least, just as Jessica said, he has her pictures to make his existence a little less miserable.

For now, it will suffice.

__

**At nineteen** Jessica is finally truly and completely over Mr. Waver.

 Really.

The problem is she doesn’t seem to be truly and completely into anyone else.

Good news is that she has, at last, gotten the hang out of college; she has changed rooms so her roommate is now a girl that is as mentally stable as one might hope and has a healthy relationship with Cheetos. She goes out, attends some parties – although she certainly doesn’t become the go-wild kind of girl – and even starts to date around even if nothing worth mentioning really comes out of it.

She still misses home, in that sort of distant way in which she misses playing play do’ on the kitchen table when she was four, but she is not deeply, disturbingly homesick anymore.

“So any boyfriend you want to tell me about?” asks her mother every.single.time they talk, as if she would have suddenly morphed into her best friend, and Jessica barely restrains herself from screaming and running or throwing the phone out of the window. Just like with university, she is getting the hang out of life too, so she rolls her eyes, sighs and moves the receiver slightly away from her ear until her mother is done saying whatever she thinks she has to say about her love life.

In moments like that she wishes she never had to go back home again.

__

At fifteen, Robbie is actually doing pretty well. He still misses Jessica, of course, but he has also come to terms with the fact that Jessica and he are in it – in love – for the long run, so he follows his father’s advice and learns to enjoy his age.

He gets into the high school basketball team and, on the weekends, starts to go to the movies or the shopping mall with kids his own age.

He stops being sad all the time.

He stops getting in detention every week and nobody calls him a weirdo anymore. He enjoys the company of beautiful girls and his recently found shallow high school popularity, still he can’t help looking forward to Christmas, Thanksgiving and Spring Break. His heart never misses the chance to skip a beat whenever he’s lucky enough to see even the distant form of Jessica around the neighborhood.

__

**At twenty** , Jessica has realized that there is not such a thing as a reasonably attractive, sweet, intelligent boy; or at very least, not anywhere near her class, her university or her life in general.

Is not like she has suddenly become one of those pessimistic girls that enjoys her emo days a little too much. No, it’s just that she has been around enough and accumulated enough life experience to realize that big romantic gestures by great guys are either just a Disney cliché for big eyed princesses or what douchebags think is needed to get into difficult girls’ pants.

Plain and painfully simple as that.

She knows she has only two options left, though: to lower her standards or to quit dating altogether and become one of those crazy cat ladies like the one in The Simpsons but she is really, really allergic to cats so it turns out it’s not even a real choice for her.

She relaxes, she lowers the proverbial bar and at twenty – and a half –, Jessica starts dating George, who is good enough, she guesses.

George is blonde and cute and barely taller than her. He has a great smile, makes her laugh, is smartand sociable and just a year her senior – which is pretty much perfect given her previous record with the male gender – and if he also likes to drink a little too much and to party a little too hard and tries to pressure her into having sex a little too often she chooses to ignore it adequately.

It’s far from perfect – Canada far, not out of this galaxy far, thank you very much – but Jessica figures that, as in every other aspect of her life, it’s just a matter of getting the hang of it.

__

At sixteen, Robbie is definitely growing up.

He is tall. He is even a little taller than his father and – according to the majority of the female population attending his high school – easy on the eye too. His shoulders are not broad yet but the exercise at basketball practice has put enough muscle over his bones that he doesn’t look pathetically skinny either, and he can’t say that Jacob’s advice on clothes and shoes and hairstyles have hurt him either.

He is also mature enough by now to understand what a massive important thing in the general concept of life it is to have an accurate sense of timing, so he schemes and calculates and as a result, esteems that Jessica and he are not going to be on the same page for quite some time yet. It’s unavoidable; now she is at college, in a couple of years he will be the one to be in college… That gives him an approximate six year window to stop obsessing about their certain future together and gain some important – and funny – experience points while enjoying the ride.

At sixteen – and a half –, Robbie gets his first girlfriend – Helen – with whom he can hang out and fool around and go to the high school balls.

Helen is a sweet and beautiful girl that endures with stoic patience the photo-shoot session his mother imposes on both of them – accompanied, of course, by a lot of weepy comments of how cute they are – and who Robbie likes quite a lot.

At some point in between making out sessions and basketballs championships victory celebrations he learns to relax and temporary forgets about the utter importance of soulmates.

\---

**At twenty one** , Jessica has mastered the noble art of procrastinating and it has certainly taken its toll on her grades.

The truth is that her boyfriend has managed to get under her skin the contagious last-year-of-college melancholy/euphoria and she has willingly let him drag her around fraternity parties and coming-of-legal-drinking-age celebrations.

She has neglected her studies. A lot. She has failed some important tests and is behind on a couple of critical essays, but she has always been an achiever and is confident that there’s still hope to save the year.

Jessica, of course, doesn’t tell any of this to her parents when she comes back home from Brown for a weekend accompanied by George. Bot, her father and her mother are way too thrilled to be finally meeting her boyfriend to ask about her academics, and most certainly she is not going to be the one to burst the metaphorical bubble.

She shows George around the neighborhood and points out the places she used to hang out at when she was a teenager, although he seems rather uninterested in any of that. When they accidentally run into Robbie on their way back home she almost doesn’t recognize him.

“Oh my God, you have grown, look at you.” He is tall now, almost as tall as she is, and his baby features have sharpened around the edges leaving a cute young face behind. “Uhm, Robbie, this is George, my boyfriend.” She turns her smiling face towards him and tries not to feel another pang of disappointment at his bored expression. “I used to… uhm… I used to baby-sit Robbie and his sister.”

Robbie smiles easily without a shadow of the sweet boy manners he used to have and extends a hand toward her boyfriend.

“Hi.”

They shake hands like equals and then Robbie looks behind him to present the cute blonde girl standing a few feet away and who, till that very moment, Jessica had though was just a random passerby.

“This is my girlfriend, Helen.”

She smiles brightly and forced, because it’s completely stupid and at least a hundred levels of crazy, but she can’t help but feel a little heartbroken that Robbie has gotten over her.

\---

At seventeen, Robbie is fooling around with her girlfriend in his room one day when Molly starts making stupid demands about some stupid chore he is supposed to be doing.

He leaves Helen at his room for a few minutes and when he comes back he finds her crying, sitting on his bed and holding Jessica’s pictures.

“What are these?” she demands in a state of fury that he didn’t suspect she was capable of.

Robbie, mature and sensitive for a guy his age, sits next to her girlfriend and holds her hands while calmly explains to her that the pictures are a gift from long time ago and that she has nothing to be insecure about. Besides, it certainly is a bit silly to be mad about pictures of a naked girl when both of them can watch naked bodies in all kind of movies, magazines and, on a very disturbing occasion, in a cereal tv spot.

Apparently, all these reasonable arguments have absolutely no impact whatsoever in Helen who insists, in no uncertain terms, that he must get rid of the pictures.

“Look, I can promise you that I have never looked at them in the time we have been together and I can promise you that I will never look at them again as long as I’m still your boyfriend. You should be able to trust me, Helen.”

“I trust you; I just want the pictures gone.”

Robbie sighs, full of sadness and resignation. He strokes Helen’s hands tenderly and looks at her in the eye.

“I’ll put them under lock, okay?”

“I want you to throw them away,” she says it like it’s an ultimatum, probably because that’s exactly what it is.

“Believe it or not they have a sentimental value. I’m not going to throw them away.”

After that Helen cries and yells and even tries to hit Robbie before storming out of his room and his house, declaring in no uncertain terms that they are over and calling him several synonymous of a pervert.

The break up is sad and tougher than he would have thought, but he is too busy writting essays and filling up college applications to be depressed about it.

“Brown?” asks his father when Robbie presents him brightly with the acceptance letter. “You want to go to Brown?”

“You don’t want me to go to Brown?” He asks confused.

“Is not that it’s just… I know this thing with Helen has been hard but–”

“It’s not about Jessica,” Robbie interrupts, “I _really_ want to go to Brown.”

His father smiles, brightly, and hugs him. “My son is going to Brown!”

Yes. At seventeen, Robbie is going to Brown.

\---

**At twenty two** , Jessica is still at college thanks to her stupid ex-boyfriend that managed not only to break her heart but also to make her lose precious life time.

She is a little sad and more than a little angry but she makes a point to remind herself that she is wiser now; more mature, more focused on what is important.

She is collecting her scattered things on the library table before heading to class, pondering if not eating pre-cooked noodles for the fourth night in a row is worth the tedious chore of buying some groceries at the unearthly hour she finishes her last class when she bumps into Robbie for the first time at Brown.

She tries to go out of the library at the same time he tries to get in and her books fall to the floor more out of surprise than by the force of the impact.

“Robbie! Hi!” she says, feeling a little uneasy when he gets down in front of her to retrieve her books.

“Hey Jessica.” He smiles and Jessica can see a little of the boy that used to light up when he saw her in that smile. “How are you?”

“Fine, fine.”

He is taller than the last time she saw him with broad shoulders and hints of a muscled torso under his shirt, as easy mannered as ever and with his characteristic sweet smile. It is no wonder there are two blonde girls waiting for him to finish talking to her with a pissed off expression.

“I’ve heard you got into the basketball team. Good job!” she says casually patting his arm and subsequently trying to ignore both the effect the feeling of his defined muscles under her hand seems to have in her gut and the looks of pure hate that both blondes are sending at her.

“It’s not a big deal,” he says with a non-committal gesture.

“Listen, do you want to have a coffee with me? Catch up, comment the latest from home…”

“Oh, I’d love to but I promised Martha and Lauren that I would study with them today.” Robbie hands her back her books. “Rain check?”

She puts her hair behind her ear nervously and smiles. “Sure!” she says, sounding maybe a little too perky. “Well, you know how to reach me.”

She starts hurriedly to walk away because she is pretty she is running late to her class when the voice of this grown up Robbie calls her.

“Jessica!” She turns backs in time to watch him hold the library door for the blondes. “It’s been really nice to see you.”

And maybe, she is just the tiniest bit less sad and less angry as she speeds around campus.

\---

At eighteen, Robbie is ridiculously not nervous as he waits for Jessica. He has clothed casually nice, has carefully disarranged his hair and has checked the schedule and location of her class twice before going to the campus cafeteria and buying two cups of coffee to take away.

Nothing to be nervous about, really. He has had a crush on her since forever and it’s not like this is brand new information to either of them.

He rests his back against the wall putting a foot up against it too for good measure and waits a couple of minutes more before he sees Jessica head out of the building, long hair and big eyes and every bit as beautiful as ever.

“Jessica!” he calls and runs toward her careful not to spill the hot beverages.

“Hey, Robbie, where you… where you waiting for me?” she asks like the mere concept is outrageously strange.

“Yes, I was. Coffee? Rain Check? Remember?”

“Yes, sure. Of course. I mean – thank you,” she says taking a coffee from his hands. “This is very nice of you, you didn’t to have to go to the trouble of–”

“Not trouble at all, I had some spare time.”

They walk toward a nearby bench and sit taking advantage of the nice wheather, chit-chatting about family and common friends for some time before falling in a comfortable conversation.

“So, how are you finding college life?” she asks him.

“Fun, mostly, although I could live without having to do the laundry.”

Jessica laughs and the sound of it warms him up inside in a way that always has made him want to kiss her. He takes a sip of coffee and swallows.

“And what do you think of the parties? You must have tons of invitations, being in the basketball team and all.”

“I’ve been to a few.”

“A few?” she asks somehow suspicious.

“You know I’m not the party hard kind of guy.”

“Yeah, no. I know. I mean, things change, right?”

“Some don’t.”

They look at each other in the eye for a couple of meaningful seconds before Jessica turns her head away slightly.

“How about girls? Any girlfriends?”

Robbie sighs quietly as she turns her head back to look at him.

“No, no one special.”

“Oh, Really?” asks genuinely surprised, “no soulmate in sight?” she insists, smiling as it were this private joke between them.

“You mean ‘new’ soulmate?”

“Well, yes.”

She empties what is left of her coffee and throws the cup to the nearest bin with rapid movement that Robbie actually knows to mean she is a little nervous.

Good.

“You should have paid more attention back in high school,” he pauses in a effort to appear a little bit mysterious, “there is not such a thing as a ‘new’ soulmate.”

Jessica blushes unintentionally and looks a little bit lost. “Surely you don’t still thinks that you and I… that we are–”

“Soulmates?”

“Yes.”

“Yes.”

“You do?”

“Ye.s”

Jessica’s big brown eyes widen and she open and closes her mouth a couple of times before she speaks again as Robbie smiles, a little proud of himself.

“But– but you had that girlfriend–”

He doesn’t let her finish the sentence. “I found myself with some free time and an urgent need to gain some experience while growing up.”

“And you – you haven’t even searched for me when you arrived here!”

“I’m not thirteen anymore. Stalking? No longer my thing.”

“Right.” She says frowning. “And what is your thing now?”

“Let me take you out on a proper date and I will show you.”

Jessica laughs and shakes her head lightly as in total disbelief, maybe even charmed against her will. Robbie smiles, as much and as widely as the muscles of his face will allow. It has taken them some time but he knows, he _knows_ , that they are in the right path now.

\---

**At twenty three,** Jessica is a little nervous about coming back home for Thanksgiving. She is in a good place know, she has a job, and an apartment and friends and a boyfriend, and she has this irrational feeling that she risks jinxing it all by going back to spend the short vacation with her parents, like the past will be there waiting to inadvertently take her happiness away from her.

At eighteen, Robbie holds Jessica’s hand as they pull over in their old neighborhood, taking a few moments to themselves before making their big entrance in their respective old homes.

“I love you, Jessica Riley,” he whispers looking at her in the eye.

“I love you, Robbie Weaver,” she whispers back.

And they both, just smile.


End file.
